Kale is growing like crazy in our backyard garden, I’m always trying to come up with new recipes, like Crispy Baked Kale. A friend told me that adding raw kale leaves to our morning fruit smoothie is a great way to stuff some more nutrients into breakfast. She guaranteed me that my kids wouldn’t be able to detect the taste.

Unfortunately, she didn’t mention that the smoothie would turn the color of sad, sad green in the otherwise zippy peach-mango smoothie.

It took me 2 weeks to get the kids to enjoy fruit smoothies again.

No more kale in smoothies, unless someone invents pink kale.

In the meantime, we’ll keep kale at the dinner table, and a recipe that we tried last week was a total winner. It’s an adaptation of a Caribbean dish called Callaloo, and I say adaptation because the dish is normally made with okra or spinach. Sunny Anderson calls this dish Kale-llaloo, as she substitutes in kale.

A dish can never go wrong when you start off with sauteed bacon and onions. Then the whole thing is simmered briefly in a sauce of coconut milk with vegetable broth.

We made slight changes to Sunny’s original recipe for Kale-llaloo, opting to keep the greens bright with a slight crunch by shortening the cooking time.

Kale and Bacon Recipe, Caribbean Style

Servings: serves 4Prep Time:5Cook Time:18

Callaloo, sometimes calaloo or kallaloo, is a Caribbean dish that is most popular and originally from Trinidad and Tobago, but is also served in Guyana and Jamaica. Callaloo is sometimes made with okra or water spinach. In this case Sunny Anderson made it with Kale, thus the name Kale-llaloo.